APL is a Marmite[1] language, and I’m one of those who love it, so I was delighted to hear that Dyalog have ported their product to the Raspberry Pi.

They were equally delighted to realise that it would be easy for them to drive C3Pi from APL.

Since then we’ve been providing occasional advice as they forged ahead with their plans. They’ve built several clones of C3Pi, and are using the on-board Raspberry Pi as a high-level controller for the on-board Arduino which is doing the motor control.

Excitement has been mounting, and yesterday I heard that the Dyalog robot was moving under APL control.

Liam Flanagan of Dyalog has written an extension that allows APL on the Pi to control devices like the Arduino using I2C, and they’ve adopted and extended our trackbot software to allow them to control C3Pi’s direction and speed. The project has also been greatly helped by Dyalog’s Jason Rivers whose experience with model aircraft has been well applied to the challenges of robotics.

The two teams will be working together over the next few weeks to extend C3Pi’s capabilities. Next on the list is an IR proximity sensor that will stop the robot from bumping into things. After that we’ll be adding sonar, and soon C3Pi will get an on-board camera. This will initially be a webcam but we expect to replace that with the super new Pi-cam when that’s generally available.

We’ll also be merging the trackbot and quick2link codebases. The quick2link project is building a simple interpreter the runs on an Arduino or similar micro-controller and allows you to issue commands from other machines using serial communications, I2C or SPI. It’s perfect for the robot application but has other uses as well.

[1] For our non-UK readers: Marmite is a strongly-flavoured spread known to most Brits, who either love it or hate it.

We’ve wanted to extend and tidy up this website for a while, and that is going to be one of our top priorities for the next few days.

More and more people are using our boards and our software libraries, and we want to make it as easy as possible for new users to get started.

Yesterday we updated the code for an old post about our analogue board to make sure it worked with the current version of the library. Next we’re adding a short article about getting started with the analogue board.

Throughout the next few days we will be adding, updating and improving content. We’d love feedback, and we we welcome suggestions. You can leave comments here but you’ll get a faster response if you post your suggestions and comments on our user forum.

We’ll tweet about the changes as we make them, so don’t forget to follow @quick2wire on twitter if you want to stay up to date!

John Davies, co-founder and CTO of Incept5 had put together a fascinating track on Finance, Technology and Implementation. Technologists from the Finance sector are not usually allowed to talk about their work but somehow John had lined up an array of speakers from several major financial institutions. Sadly the track clashed with ours (see below) but I’ve heard good things about the talks.

Steve Freeman and I were asked to put together a half-day Maker track. It was a great success.

We talked about our Making efforts here at Quick2Wire, and Rain Ashford told us about her work with wearable technology.

Wearable tech has some very significant applications. She told us abut research that’s helping people on the Autistic spectrum to better understand the mood of others. She also talked about her work in the area of the Quantified Self (QS) movement.

Steve Freeman has been telling me for days how excited he was about Ward Cunningham’s new Federated Wiki. Yesterday I found out why.

Most of you will know what an amazing man Ward is. He invented the Wiki, and is responsible for many other widely-used software tools. The hallmark of his design is beautiful, useful simplicity.

I want to do justice to the Federated wiki and Txtzyme, and this post is already a long one. All I’ll say for now is that on Friday evening, dropping with tiredness, I somehow found the energy to fork both of Ward’s projects and start playing. Within minutes I was running a hacked Txtzyme implementation on an Arduino, and using it to control an LED from my laptop.

This stuff is mind-blowing – simple, powerful and free.

Ward has kindly agreed to do an email interview for this website, so expect more detail soon.

QCon was well organised, very well attended, and packed with interesting talks. If you’re a software professional, or interested in what top professionals do, then QCon is a must. And if you can’t wait till next year, you can find this year’s talks (and other excellent material) available on InfoQ.

Your project must run on the Raspberry Pi, and must be an original work by you.

The hardware and software for each project must be Open Source. Hardware must be licensed under the CC 3.0 share-alike license; your software and any libraries that you use must be licensed under the MIT license or LGPL.

The project does not have to be complete, but a significant part of it must be demonstrably working.

The winning projects will be chosen by a panel of judges (to be announced) on the basis of

educational value

utility

time and money required (less is better and

technical merit

We’ll also take your age into account if you are under 18.

The decision of the judges will be final.

Entries must be received by 8 AM UK time on Monday 15th April, and the winner will be announced on 1st May.

If you live within reach of Milton Keynes, you won’t want to miss nest weeks’ Raspberry Jam.

Peter Onion and friends run these each month at the The National Museum of Computing, Bletchley Park. Up to 40 Raspberry Pi enthusiasts turn up for an informal but lively session. There are lots of experienced Pi users as well as a healthy sprinkling of beginners, and you can always wander round the museum once the meeting is over.

C3Pi is our experimental tracked robot with an onboard Raspberry Pi and an Arduino.

The Pi drives the Arduino over I2C, and the Arduino drives a motor controller board using PWM.

The Python program that drives the Pi uses our I2C library; it’s about four lines of code.

At the moment all we do is respond to a character sent by the Pi by doing a little dance like a bee that has just found some honey. The next step is to define a simple protocol that will allow the Pi to set C3Pi’s speed and direction. After that we will add a Sharp distance sensor which will tell the Pi to stop the motor if C3Pi approaches an obstacle.

We’re using a SparkFun logic level shifter to interface the 3.3v I2C levels on the Pi to the 5v on the Arduino. Here’s a picture of the current configuration:

Yesterday evening I went along to the inaugural London Arduino Meetup. It was very well organised by Marc Barto (@marc_in_london). The capacity crowd was interesting and lively.

Marc is keen to bring together new experimenters and experienced mentors, and that format should work really well. At the next meeting there will be a chance for projects to do a pitch for help, and I think we’ll be looking at plans for workshops.

There will also be talks, and a chance for participants to show off our latest projects.

Last night there was a fascinating presentation by Tim Burrell-Saward (@tburrellsaward). He’s a maker and designer, and he showed us some of the outstanding installations he’s created. One of my favourites was a Wikipedia update snowstorm (not its proper name, which I forget) – a farm of re-purposed supermarket checkout printers overhead, spitting out updates to wikipedia as thy were made. The short printouts fell to the ground like snowflakes.

The group is not just for Arduiners. It welcomes all Makers using systems on a chip. There’s a focus on Arduino but the group is happy to embrace other platforms. Many of us turned out to be Raspberry Pi enthusiasts. Since Quick2Wire is experimenting with Pi/Arduino combinations, I think we’ll get a lot of value from the group, and will do our best to give value back in return.

I hope to attend the next meeting (TBA) and will take along C3Pi (né trackbot) – our experimental Pi/Arduino based tracked robot.